‘Creative use of data’ can seem a mysterious and yet dull world of arcane process. But from the first shoots at FCB/SIX in Toronto, now fully flowering at Performance Art, CCO Ian Mackenzie and his colleagues have grown a hybrid data and creativity-driven approach for multi-award winning, original and effective work. We asked him to reveal his roots.
L[A] What is Performance Art?
IM We seek to address a schism at the heart of advertising, which is the idea that high creative and high performance are at odds somehow. From an agency structure point of view, they’ve tended to live in different worlds. Our offer is to take all the mousetrap stuff, such as the technical fundamentals of performance marketing and CRM [customer relationship management], anything that’s been thought of as “hard-working” lower or mid-funnel, and run it across the entire customer journey so that it can also power high emotional experiences. Basically, start with a big, emotional brand building idea, and then push it all the way through.
Because we’ve built the agency of a foundation CRM, I think it gives us a differentiator. We’re familiar with how first-party data works. Our bread and butter has been built on being able to individualize hundreds of millions of email communications a year. That’s our starting credential, but then we differentiate with an uncharacteristic focus on creative upside.
L[A] How did you start out?
IM When I was developing as a creative person professionally, I often felt pegged as “the cerebral”. I was a bit insecure about it. I asked myself: ‘Is that a bad thing? Are we not supposed to be thinking? What am I doing wrong here? Maybe my kind of creativity isn’t right for this industry?’. These were the days when the most universally acknowledged measure of talent was how funny your beer ad was.
I got the sense there was a kind of war against the intellectuals in our industry, which is of course a wild overstatement and not actually true. But I remember thinking it at the time. It was like the most important thing is that we don’t ask anyone out there to think too hard. More than that, it set up a bunch of what I’ve come to think of as false binaries. Simple vs. complicated. Smart vs. dumb. Traditional vs. digital. Brand building vs. activation. Data vs. creative.
Fortunately, I started in the business at a time when the growth was in digital, an emergent discipline that had no choice but to try to reconcile those binaries. I liked digital and creating systems that had to work together, and I loved how measurable it all was, even though that’s also led to the widespread problem of vanity metrics.
After some early successes in the space, which by the way were both intellectual and emotional, I was out there in the desert searching for my space and my people. Then I started talking to Andrea Cook, who had just gone over to a company within IPG and had the challenge of starting a new CRM agency, a creative data agency, within FCB.
I didn't know what a creative data agency was. But it turns out that the foundation for a creative data agency can be CRM because of its relationship to the first part of data … So I started to learn CRM and pull all the rest of my digital, creative and brand experience through that lens, and then build a team of people who were excited to try some new things.
L[A] So that became FCB/SIX …
IM Yes, we were about five years with FCB, with lots to show for it – tons of growth, excited clients, some work that had shown the industry what creative data could be – and then we had an opportunity within IPG to pull out our vision and put it against a larger canvas. So we started Performance Art with a vision of helping clients do the most effective work in the most creative way.
L[A] Great name.
IM Thanks! It does say pretty much exactly what we're here to do. Now we're working with clients who are excited by our instinct towards powering experiences across the journey by using some of the fundamentals of creative data to bring their brands to life. Because brand clients – CMOs – are often well ahead of many agencies in asking questions about data and tech and see that as vital to how they're going to build their brand.
L[A] What's driving that?
IM Measurability and accountability. Marketing is expensive. And customer relationships are more important and valuable than they’ve ever been. A creative agency that really embraces technology as an enabler of creative ideas in a disciplined way can unlock the upside in all sorts of ways: from a storytelling standpoint, from an efficacy standpoint, from a brand building standpoint. But in order to do that, it’s good to be able to think of creativity in a way where you acknowledge its inherent complicity, rather than starting with the bias that the most important thing is always going to be simplicity.
L[A] And that’s not how creatives tend to think of ideas…
IM I think so. A while back I wrote a little essay called Simple Is Bad, which was a reaction to what I consider our industry's overactive simplicity bias. I often heard people say something like: ‘OK, but can it just be simple?’ I always thought, ‘what a perfect way to kill a good idea before it has a chance to emerge.’ Sure, simplicity is an ingredient in most great work. But if you say simplicity is the gate we have to get through first, then we're going to miss a ton of opportunity.
Another approach to the question is to say: data is everywhere, we’re all just swimming in it. It's a great raw material that has high strategic value, high value to the customer, has high value to the creative, and throws out the binaries.
L[A] How does this play out in practice?
IM It probably starts best with a big tent idea of data. In other words, data is first-party, third-party, analytics, stuff you can count just by looking at it, etc. It’s all good creative material. Data is the starting point for how you get to dynamic data visualization work like we did for PFLAG with Destination Pride. It’s how we can make the piece we did for BMW recently.
L[A] The mapping app for all those bends in the road across US roads that are like the sharp curve in the distinctive BMW rear window? Cool idea. That really plays to people who like cars and driving. And your creative solution sits atop a mass of data and clever tech.
IM Yes, exactly. The Hofmeister Kink.
L[A] When Performance Art started taking off, what and who were you looking to bring together? Are you structured differently? You somehow have to combine rigorous and reliable delivery with high-end creative output.
IM As Performance Art, we set out both to extract the value of a creative-led agency and to create an environment where delivery can happen reliably at scale. We have folks who are trained in delivery, but neither aspect – creative nor delivery – is on a higher footing than the other. Both must be amazing. Both are so needed.
We have folks who know how to dependably deploy a billion+ emails a year, navigating tech stacks, platforms and data warehouses. Then we have folks on the other side who came up making car commercials within more pure creative agencies. Then we have technology solutions that we deliver and purely strategic solutions, such as around customer journeys. We have to be structured for that stuff as well. It's a mix of specialist talent … and specialist talents tend to thrive at Performance Art.
L[A] Let us go to a real project that has attracted a lot of acclaim - The Black Elevation Map has been picking up top honors, including the Jury Prize at Cresta Awards. How did that come about?
IM We wanted a follow-up to Go Back To Africa, a piece of work that we had done with [specialist travel agency] Black & Abroad that was transformational both for them, for us, and to some degree for culture generally. We launched that in 2019 and it had a measurable impact on the usage of a racial slur, and a big impact on building the client’s brand. If you want to see evidence of that, you can go to Instagram and look at the hashtag GoBackToAfrica. You actually see aspirational images of the brand's audience traveling to Africa and posting under that hashtag. That specific behavior virtually didn't exist prior to that campaign.
It was a huge brand lift for Black & Abroad. For our agency, then FCB/SIX, and, we think a great demonstration to the industry of what a big creative idea could look like if it was treated as a data idea.
For our follow-up to Go Back To Africa, we thought we could take a look at domestic travel within the US and bring to life the brand's point of view on it. For example, the brand's point of view on supporting Black-owned businesses, which it has always done.
Working with our brilliant clients at Black & Abroad, Eric Martin and Kent Johnson, we started looking at the history of domestic travel for this community in the U.S. And you quickly come across Victor Hugo Green's Green Book, which was a travel guide during the Jim Crow era. Back then travel for this community, for the most part, involved a lot of safety issues. We wondered if there was a way to build on the legacy of that remarkable project.
Ultimately, recreating the Green Book was not the way forward, but it was an important touchstone as we developed our domestic travel solution. As we developed our approach, we explored how it could reflect the brand’s relentless positivity, its uplifting spirit – and there is … an elevation map. What if you took a traditional elevation map, but instead of elevation data, it was powered by Black cultural data? So that's the idea. And it never changes through execution. But how do you make that? Where’s the data? How do you measure culture? That was the journey we went on.
L[A] So it is a simple big idea but one made out of lots of complex data. It’s not easy to deliver as you did, creating something that's very accessible, that's very engaging, and has an emotional resonance.
IM Absolutely. By the way, have you ever been to the mountains?
L[A] Of course.
IM Then you know mountains are inherently emotional.
L[A] Yes, it's a powerful thing to walk or climb up a mountain. It is emotional.
IM That's how we felt. We knew we were going to build scaffolding upon something that is inherently emotional. We knew that with what we built people would have to feel something.
So we have this core idea. But what's the data? How are we going to make the front end of the website work? Is it a utility or is it an experience? We had a lot of conversations like that because if you're promising a domestic travel utility that's going to help people figure out what restaurant to go to … does it have good reviews? Can they book it? Is it close to my hotel? Can I build an itinerary?
If you promise the world the utility of that kind of scale, you might fall short. There are lots of great travel utilities out there. On the other hand, if it can be an engaging experience, it can be a gift to the world in terms of how the brand sees the world and what it means when you have concentrations of culture.
In truth, in addition to the experience of using the story, there actually is utility to the Black Elevation Map platform. But we took the pressure off it trying to be all things to all users. Success was landing the story, a sense of uplift, and reflection of how Black culture elevates the country where it’s found.
L[A] There's a sense of celebration of the material, and then you can explore it, and then you can start going off elsewhere. That’s a fantastic thing to serve up, to bring it together, and create that celebratory statement.
IM We looked for data that was universal. There were lots of pockets of data. For example, we could get all this data that's good for Phoenix, Arizona, but we wouldn't have access to that same data for the town across the state. We wanted to prioritize data that we could get a pool of across the entire country.
L[A] How long does it take to do that, to bring that stuff together?
IM I would say the whole development process took more than a year. We probably underestimated how long it would take. Perhaps that was a trick we played on ourselves to make sure we didn't get discouraged. We could have and maybe should have popped into the delivery layer a little quicker. But it’s part of juggling the delivery along with a creative-led attitude of ‘oh, let's make this thing because it's going to be amazing and we really believe in it.’ That push and pull is healthy.
L[A] Where do you want to go next?
IM We're growing fast, which is super-exciting. There is an unmet need in the market for high-performance work that is also highly-creative. We're actively exploring opening up more offices in more places around the world.
We are looking to articulate our vision through the work as we grow and as we service clients in more and more places around the world. Excited about what’s ahead.
Ian Mackenzie is Chief Creative Officer at Performance Art, in New York and Toronto.
IAN MACKENZIE'S CULTURAL FUEL
EVENT
An incredible web3 and crypto conference in San Francisco hosted by Circle. Hearing Jeremy Allaire and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin chat about collusion-resistant voting structures was a major highlight.
GAME
Didn’t finish the whole video game, but spent plenty of hours in Japanese developer FromSoftware’s The Land Between. Wonderful world building and difficulty arc, bursting with imagination and craft.
MOVIES
A western that’s nasty, brutish and short.
I like the death dream reading. Either way, wow.
MUSIC
Emotive ballad on the new Death Cab For Cutie album, Asphalt Meadows.
PODCAST
Great sightlines into Saturday Night Live, one of the comedy world’s longest running – and most – powerful creative engines. Also often funny.
RESTAURANTS
Whenever I’m in a new city, I always try to find the good vegan restaurants to see how different folks are answering that brief. Had the Shawarma at Forky’s Old Town in Prague recently. Really good!
YOUTUBE REVIEWS
Backpack people are the new sneakerheads. Example: https://youtu.be/VWpCJNqdn_4
BOOKS
I’ve seen this one around for a few years. It’s great. Insightful, useful, readable.
A powerful and generous memoir from Jesse Wente that helped deepen my understanding of the relationship between the appropriation of land and the appropriation of culture, among its many great insights.
